Rusty wire a rustic treasure

I come from a family of proud stockmen and when I was younger my weekends and school holidays where always filled with riding horses and mustering cattle.
There isn’t a job I would rather be doing.
There are not too many jobs where you learn something new every day.
I have struck a good balance in Mackay and I love that I can work at the busy newspaper and I still have time to compete at Campdrafts on the weekends.
I am still a country girl at heart and I think Mackay still feels that little...

LIKE trash is someone's treasure, rusty-old barbed wire can twist into a precious keepsake for some.

Aaron Payne, a part-time farm-hand from Freestone near Warwick in south-west Queensland, is making some extra dollars by rounding up used wire and moulding it into lawn ornaments.

The funky barbed wire balls are mostly made on order, but he has had success at local markets.

Medium-sized balls took about half an hour to twist into shape, he said.

"Old barbed-wire is just a waste, so I thought 'why not?',” the 20-year-old said.

He taught himself the knack of rolling them up from watching YouTube clips. The rustic flair of the balls has caught the attention of the 'hipster market', but Aaron laughed off that he was an artist himself.

"It's just old wire I am finding around on the farm,” he said.

Working with rusty wire is challenging enough, but Aaron does all of his work one-handed.

The teen underwent an anatomical hemisphere- ctomy operation, which in simple terms means half of his brain was removed in order to combat rare disease Rasmussen's Encephalitis.

While tricky to make, Aaron is on a roll and confident he will soon clean up all the wire in his area.